


concerto for two violins

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Minor Dorothea Arnault/Edelgard von Hresvelg, Minor Edelgard von Hresvelg & Hubert von Vestra, Non-Linear Narrative, Relationship Study, Singing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:54:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27100768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: Edelgard thinks their friendship is blossoming in peacetime. To Dorothea, this is an opportunity to make yet another joke—to toss her lovely head and say that the seed of such an operatic friendship, which is in its own unquestionable way something to sing about, must have been planted before they even met.In which Dorothea and Hubert make music together—before, during, and after the war.
Relationships: Dorothea Arnault & Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28





	concerto for two violins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katsugenki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katsugenki/gifts).



> This is for Yan, who requested some Dorobert friendship feat. singing, and was very accommodating of my desire for wacky time shenanigans. I'm sorry this has been such a long time coming, Yan, but it's always such a pleasure to tell stories for you.
> 
> Anachronistic musical instruments abound in this fic. No actual violins feature, but: [title.](https://youtu.be/sHe9mPFsPeQ?t=216)

_Where does music come from  
and where does it go when it’s over—_

_— Lisel Mueller, “Place and Time”_

* * *

Hubert’s growing soft in his old age. At least, that’s what Edelgard thinks, and Dorothea seems all too happy to make herself an accomplice to the joke. Consider, she says, the first time she ever came to the house in the mountains, on the green tide of a warm and fragrant springtime. She had heard him rehearsing one of her arias on the piano from all the way down the path, as though anticipating her arrival. No, as though he knew for a fact that she was soon to arrive. There can be, to her mind, no other reason.

The second time she visits them, the leaves on the trees around their house are turning, and some of the autumn is in her hair, too, when she comes in out of the dusk. That night, she joins Hubert at the piano, lays one hand gently on the sidearm. As Edelgard listens, a new book sitting open in her lap, they sing.

The song is an old one, a folk ballad about the Airmid River and the roses that grow there. It surprises them both to learn Hubert still knows it, much less remembers it this well—word for word, down to the later verses most people cut out during feasts and festivals. Their surprise is unsurprising; it’s but logical to assume it of Hubert that he’d most likely have honed the blade of his memory toward less trivial pursuits than playing old songs end to end without the benefit of sheet music. But it is also amusing, in a way he will never permit in words. The way Edelgard lifts her head from the pages, especially, and the way Dorothea’s eyes widen, the delight in them transparent.

Edelgard thinks their friendship is blossoming in peacetime. To Dorothea, this is an opportunity to make yet another joke—to toss her lovely head and say that the seed of such an operatic friendship, which is in its own unquestionable way something to sing about, must have been planted before they even met.

Hubert, meanwhile, sees fit to hold his peace and say nothing at all, joking or otherwise.

* * *

“I thought I’d find you over here,” says Dorothea, stepping out beyond the circle of light that pools in the doorway of the dining hall and into the shadows where Hubert stands. There’s a messenger crow perched on the stone balustrade before him, a letter unrolled in his hands carrying tidings from a spy in Fhirdiad, back the way their army had come. In the room she’s left behind, their friends have begun a drinking song. Someone—it sounds like Petra—is laughing. Perhaps Edelgard is even being prevailed upon to smile.

Hubert shifts to one side, near-imperceptibly, to make room for Dorothea when she comes to stand beside him. He spares her only one glance, only long enough to catalogue some cursory observations: she’s put her hair up for the evening, rouged her cheeks, dabbed salve under her eyes to erase the shadows that had settled there after so many nights on the march. What a labor it must have been, he thinks, to put on that face. A little war all on its own, to the end of being called beautiful again.

When asked, Hubert has never disagreed with the assertion that Dorothea is indeed beautiful, even if he means it only in the sense that what he observes cannot dispute it. Otherwise, the matter of her beauty is inconsequential to him. These days, underneath it all, he knows it is just as inconsequential to her.

“You need not worry for me,” he says, as he folds the letter up and stows it in the inside pocket of his cloak. “I highly doubt any of our remaining enemies would come for my head so soon.”

“I’m not worried for your head,” says Dorothea, crossing her arms over her middle in that pensive way that always means she has still more to say. Hubert waits, watching out the corner of one eye as she worries the inside of her cheek between her teeth; eventually, hesitantly, it emerges. “I just… Well, Hubie, I know there’s still work to be done.”

“Indeed there is,” Hubert agrees, when she does not continue. “The work waits for no one, much as some of us would like to believe we have time for celebrations.”

“It’s true that some of us feel we have more to celebrate than others.” Someone in the hall behind them twangs a chord on a lute, badly, as Caspar tries—and fails—to begin a new song. He’s sharp, so sharp his voice cracks midline, and Dorothea appears to bite back a smile. “But celebrations have their place too, I should think, especially for something so important as the end of a war. It’s true that, in many ways, the work is just beginning—but it’s worthwhile in its own way to invest in bolstering the morale of soldiers and citizenry alike, that we might have ready hands to set to the work anew when the time comes.”

Hubert raises an eyebrow, only slightly, and considers this.

“That is true,” he concedes, and Dorothea nods.

After another momentary pause that must, in the end, be hardly as long as it feels, Hubert also nods.

“All right,” he says. “You’ve made your point. Just let me send this bird on its way, and I will return with you without resistance.”

“You make it sound like I’ve got you at swordpoint.” Dorothea does smile, then, with no small measure of triumph, but she accords him the courtesy of her silence as he retrieves his own letter, pre-written, from a different inside pocket. It’s only after he’s attached it to the crow’s leg and released it into the deepening night that he offers his arm to her.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” Hubert inquires of that smile, bemused, as she takes his arm, anchoring her hand in the crook of his elbow. “Even I am not above indulging Lady Edelgard’s whims, now and then.”

A last observation: over time, Dorothea’s magic has scarred her hands, faint scorch marks and webs of white spidering lines covering them from wrist to fingertips. A battle mage’s hands. Hubert’s own, underneath the gloves he does not remove in all but the most trusted company, are exactly the same.

It isn’t that there’s nothing to be done about the damage. There is a glamour they might cast on these hands, to make them smooth again, at least to the eye. Neither of them have done so.

“It wasn’t Edie who sent me after you, on a whim or otherwise,” she tells him, as they begin to walk back inside—back to where the lamps continue to burn. “I chose to come.”

* * *

“What do you think of Dorothea?” Edelgard asks Hubert as they weed the courtyard one morning, reaching down to pull a thistle up by the roots.

It’s an odd question, coming from nowhere—and vague, possibly by design. Hubert says nothing about this.

“She can be ill-behaved,” he says, in the midst of uprooting a rather unsightly cluster of dandelions. “And capricious, and she spends far too much time engaged in her silly flirtations.” A memory, still fresh and vivid, rises to the surface then—a lightning bolt between the cliffs of Zanado, and a man dead as these dandelions at Hubert’s feet, the hatchet that had no doubt been swinging toward his throat half-buried in the dirt now. After some consideration of it, he amends, “But I will say her diligence has made her a capable mage. She acquitted herself admirably at our last skirmish in the Red Canyon, I thought.”

“Yes, I thought so, too,” Edelgard says. “I was just thinking that I found the gossip about her uncharitable.”

“That she bought her way into the Academy on the arm of some duke or other? Idle prattle.” This is true enough. Hubert has had words with the knights on more than one occasion about the same thing. “The endorsement of such a man would be useless without real ability to support it. And I have heard the professor means to start training her in healing, on top of her studies in black magic—that too is something.”

“Is that so? I didn’t have her figured for a woman of faith.”

“She isn’t,” he clarifies. “At least not in the conventional way, as far as I can tell. But if she is finding something here in which she can choose to believe, I don’t imagine the results will be insubstantial.”

“I see,” says Edelgard, frowning down at the grass in that singular way that tells him she has something on her mind and no words to banish it with, just yet.

Hubert watches her, and thinks of Dorothea Arnault. Another significant part of the most uncharitable gossip is that she is here at the Academy to find a suitable spouse, and thereby secure a life of comfort where before she had no such privilege. The ultimate goal: an absence of worry for the rest of her days.

Such an ambition looks shortsighted and small to him, more so perhaps to Edelgard, though he finds he can understand well the way her eyes already seek to look beyond their time here. To see the Academy as a mere diversion, pleasant though it can be, in its more banal moments—in the end, only a means to an end.

Those who speak too much and do not watch and listen enough would say she does not belong among the Black Eagles, this Dorothea—but such an assumption is foolish to Hubert. She has always already been theirs.

“Hubert,” says Edelgard, after a while. Her back is to him now, her head bent downward still. “Have you heard her sing?”

It’s likely Edelgard does not remember, but they both have, from the Emperor’s box at the opera. They had been sitting up so very straight, flanked on either side by their fathers, listening. Dorothea had been little more than a bejeweled voice in the darkness then, reaching up to something resembling heaven. It must not even have been very long ago.

Whatever she might be now, this Dorothea, Edelgard clearly wants to know her. She will not say as much, nor does Hubert intend ask after the reasons why—but he’ll bear it in mind, of course.

“I have,” he says.

* * *

Midway through the day they mean to spend packing up the Emperor’s rooms—a process that’s altogether simpler than it seems at first, if only because the soon-to-be former Emperor has not stopped living like a soldier in the years since the war’s end—Dorothea arrives to cause trouble. Which is to say, to offer her help as Edelgard sorts a small mountain of jewels she’s never worn into three wooden boxes, for giving away or melting down or keeping as they collectively see fit.

“You’re really taking no prisoners, are you?” Dorothea remarks, holding up a necklace of emeralds and beaten gold. At Edelgard’s nod, she lays it inside the box marked _Foundry—_ by far the fullest of the three. “Even the crown.”

“The crown has always been too heavy for my liking,” says Edelgard. “And anyway it’s a relic of a bygone age. I’d gladly melt it down if it meant no one else would ever have to wear it again.”

Dorothea’s smile is fond, if a touch wry. “I suppose it’s just like you to want to consign yourself to history so soon, crown and all.”

“You know it’s for the best, just as I do. You can have the crown, if you’re so partial to it—keep it at the opera house as a memento.”

The crown sits on the table between them, the golden horns freshly polished, the ruby in the center agleam when Dorothea lifts it up. She peers at it in silence awhile, turning it slowly around in the light, supporting its weight in both hands.

“What do you think, Hubie?” she asks, inclining her head toward where Hubert stands by the bookcase. “Might I have it in me to bear the weight of this crown?”

“I would not wish the burdens Lady Edelgard has chosen to bear on another living soul,” Hubert dutifully deadpans. “Furthermore, her Majesty prefers that delicate neck of yours unbroken, and I’ll admit I am inclined to think the same.”

“Well, aren’t you sweet! I knew you cared about me,” Dorothea drawls, and she and Edelgard share a laugh. For a moment they could almost be a pair of girls at school again, giggling over some gossip, sharing some joke at their classmate’s expense.

This is, as far as Hubert can tell, what the future looks like from where they are standing: a house in the mountains in the Prime Minister von Aegir’s name, with a piano and a painting room. A garden. A surprising absence of work that neither he nor Edelgard has yet determined how to fill—long days of stasis they might spend on anything, or nothing, strange as the thought might be. The only certainty thus far is that he will stay with her.

Dorothea, meanwhile, will remain in Enbarr a while. She means to rehabilitate the opera, to carve out a place for beauty and for song anew in this scarred, exhausted city. She’s told them both many times not to worry for her, and Hubert, at least, is committed to keeping his word. He had helped Edelgard choose the ring that sits on Dorothea’s finger now—a plain silver band, set with a single moonstone—although he had not been present when she gave it. The two of them have promised to write. Presumably the rest will follow from there.

There’s not much that needs to be carried over from the old life into the new: only the plainest clothes they own, and whatever books they truly can’t bear to leave behind. These are fewer than anticipated, but as Hubert takes the last of his spellbooks down from the shelf Dorothea interposes with one more, balancing it atop the small stack already in his hands. It is, as far as he can tell from a quick glance at the cover, a folio of sheet music. The spine is cracked, the pages yellowing, but still holding together well enough.

“Edie told me you’re a good hand at the piano,” she says, by way of explanation. “Oh, Hubie, what an accompanist you’ll make now you’ve the time to practice! There are so many duets I’d love to sing with you when I visit.”

Edelgard conceals another smile, smaller now, behind her sleeve, as Hubert accepts the book with a long-suffering sigh.

* * *

Over the first year of the war, the Black Eagle Strike Force had turned the cathedral into a second infirmary.

It was an operation that had required all hands, and they’d toiled at it from sunup to midnight without pause, moving the pews along the walls, covering a few with blankets to make more makeshift beds. They’d cut up old uniforms for bandages for hours. When they made to build a fire where the altar used to be, Dorothea had emptied a bottle of holy wine onto the wood to feed the flames, and remarked that _well, if they said to bring all our weary and burdened here, we may as well do just that, all this space may as well be made useful for something._

Hubert has not worked with the wounded much since then. He has no head for it, being on the whole better suited for the taking of life than the restoring of it, but now and then in his own comings and goings he will pass the open doors of the once-great cathedral and hear Professor Manuela barking orders with the ferocity of a general. He sees Linhardt spelling a broken staff whole again, his typically vacant countenance sharpened to a razor’s edge. He sees Dorothea, too, with fresh burn scars on her fingers and a map of bloodstains and bile across her skirt, and thinks, _So these are the particular vanities of healing._

Another, deeper vanity: Dorothea does not sleep. Hubert ascertains this for himself one night that Edelgard sends him to retrieve her, when he finds her at the bedside of a wounded boy, singing lullabies.

The boy’s name is unknown to Hubert. Perhaps it is also unknown to Dorothea, but in all likelihood his name matters less to her than the fact that, no more than a few hours ago, they had all watched her excise an arrow from his gut, come away with an arrowhead the size of her fist. The lullabies must be a kind of penance now—recompense for the continuing pain she can do nothing about.

Hubert makes no sound when he draws up by her side, and so must clear his throat slightly to announce his presence. “The hour is late, and you’ve done all you can.”

“I hope so,” she murmurs, tucking the blanket over the boy and smoothing out a nonexistent wrinkle with one palm. “He’ll probably sleep through the night, at least, but I should be here in case he doesn’t.”

At the sound of the word _should,_ Hubert looks up at the ceiling, and then down again at the boy’s face. He changes his weight from one foot to the other, considers his orders, and forges on.

“In under an hour,” he tells her, “Constance von Nuvelle will come to relieve you. Lady Edelgard sent me to make sure you allow her to do so. I have her permission to use a moderate amount of force to subdue you should you elect to put up a fight about it.”

The threat, flimsy as it is, does not so much as make her flinch. He had not expected it to. It well may be that an earthquake could hit them right this minute and send every stained-glass window shattering into tiny shards, and Dorothea would still be here, exhausted in her chair, numb down to the bones.

“Leave it to Edie.” She closes her eyes, releases a shuddering breath. Her right hand twitches toward the blanket again, imagining more wrinkles, more wounds she’s left untended. “Hubie, I really shouldn’t go.”

“As I said, you’ve done all you can,” Hubert says. “To insist you have more to offer than that is hubris only.”

That stills her. She looks at him, straight in the eye, and folds. “Well, when you put it that way.”

Her knees will not unbend, and so without ceremony Hubert bends for her, picking her up in his arms to bear her bodily back to her room. He already knows it will worry Edelgard later to hear that Dorothea did nothing but curl herself against his chest without resistance or humor. Not a word, not even a quip about being on the receiving end of a gallantry she would never have expected from him.

The last time Hubert had had cause to hold another person, he had been only a child, carrying Edelgard out of the dungeon in which his father had tried to bury her, and his eyes had burned when they emerged again into the light. She had been much the same, so pallid and still, staring past him at nothing.

Dorothea is tall, much taller than Edelgard and that much more unwieldy to hold—but just as brittle. It is not difficult to imagine all the places she must be bleeding from, out of sight.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asks, quietly, as they cross the courtyard under the frosty light of the Guardian Moon.

“You’re going to think this is silly,” Dorothea says, and closes her eyes, like she means to spare herself the shame of seeing whatever face he makes when she says it. “But could you sing me that old song? About the banks of the Airmid?”

Hubert does not tell Dorothea about the dungeon, or that he had been singing then too, on his way up the stone steps that seemed to wind upward and upward into the darkness forever. He does not tell her who the last person he ever sang to was, or that on that day she had died, and been reborn.

“Very well.”

* * *

The first time Dorothea ever heals him, on the steps of Conand Tower, Hubert already knows this: she will not remember it, but he will.

The wound itself is nothing. A cut above one brow from an arrow he had been just a hair too slow to dodge. It had bled magnificently, of course, as injuries to the head are wont to do, but the truth is he had barely even felt it. Still, Dorothea had not let it go; she had taken his chin in her hand, unhesitating, and wiped the blood from his face with a handkerchief out of her pocket. And now she is kneeling beside him on the same crumbling stone stair as their classmates come to stand by them in a loose, broken circle. To the left is Linhardt leaning a weary elbow on Caspar’s shoulder, to the right Petra with her arm through Bernadetta’s. Edelgard at the foot of the stairs with her axe still drawn, and beyond her Ferdinand, and the professor. All of them waiting. All of them catching their breath.

The sky above is heavy with clouds, and Dorothea’s spell is slow to take, a candle guttering in the rising wind. The patience to wait for it comes to Hubert easily enough. Faith can be unwieldy thing, for the likes of them most of all—and ironically perhaps that understanding is what brings the light to her fingertips. Then he feels it on his skin, burning the wound closed. What’s left of the blood must follow seconds later.

It pains him more sharply than the arrowhead, being healed. He does not tell this Dorothea, who already seems to know it well. She stares at his face long after the cut closes, then down at her singed fingers, as though struggling to understand what she’s just done.

In the end, it’s Hubert who says it aloud for her to hear, who tells her, “I am better now.”

It’s only then that Dorothea releases the breath she’s been holding, gradually, like a tremor in the earth. She smiles. “That’s good to know.”

* * *

After the war, Dorothea agrees to return to the opera for just one season. In turn, Hubert and Edelgard go to see her just the once, on opening night.

Tonight’s show is an old myth retold, about a poet who journeys to the land of the dead to offer his songs to the gods in exchange for the soul of his love. Ultimately, it’s a tragedy—but it is also a fantasy, no history to it whatsoever. A favorite of romantics. This is probably also by design.

The Mittelfrank Opera House, shuttered but largely unburnt by the war years, feels more than a little mythical now. Hubert, making his way two steps behind Edelgard up the grand carpeted staircase, had been so acutely aware of the light. More than once he’d found his eyes drawn up toward the high dome of the ceiling, to the glittering chandeliers suspended overhead, and thought, _How blinding._

It is years and years, now, since he first took his place beside Edelgard in the Emperor’s box. When he turns, to her, she too is looking up.

“Dorothea is to sing the role of the poet tonight,” she tells him. “She says there’s no reason for a role like that to be given to a man only, when the very soul of the story itself has to do with seeing things not as they are, but as they ought to be.”

“That sounds like her,” says Hubert. “I look forward to seeing what other edits she’s made to the libretto. They’ve always been far too indulgent of her in this place.”

“It’s just as well they are. This is the beginning and the end for her, as far as the opera is concerned. They’re probably more than happy to allow her to do all that she wants to do.”

She smiles then. Hubert has not failed to notice that Edelgard is smiling more since she announced her intention to abdicate in the spring, in a singularly gentle and weary way, as if she is only just learning how to bear her own weight. It only stands to reason, perhaps, when she is only just beginning to be alone with herself again.

“And what of you, my lady?” he asks. “Are you, too, doing all that you want to do, here at the beginning and the end?”

“I’m afraid I don’t yet know what I want to do.” Edelgard spreads her fingers against the skirts of her gown, examining the ungloved backs of her hands like she is seeing them for the first time. “Want had nothing to do with it, before. That’s something that’s just beginning too.”

“Well,” Hubert says. “Time enough for that, I suppose, in the days to come.”

The theater darkens all around them then, almost on cue. They quiet down and wait for Dorothea, sitting right where she is certain to see them, even with the brightest of the stage lights in her eyes.

* * *

What little respite there is to be found in the early years of their war—what rare fistfuls of days exist that they do not spend on the march or doing battle—Dorothea passes at the orphanage in town, teaching reading and music to the children there. At Edelgard’s behest, Hubert sometimes accompanies her, coming and going—often enough that the children in question ought to have grown accustomed to the sight of him, by now, but they are not.

“Dorothea, the big scary man’s come for you.” The boy who had seen Hubert come down the road and gone running to Dorothea is a favorite of hers, as far as Hubert can tell. Or would like to fancy himself her favorite, if the way he shoulders himself to the front of the small crowd of children gathered at her feet is any indication.

Hubert opts not to follow his example. He doesn’t draw near, but waits just up the path, as Dorothea rises and sets aside the lute she had been playing a moment ago, handing it over with a smile to the tallest of the girls. The boy sticks close by her side, body angled slightly in front of hers as if to shield her, although the way his hand has reached out to take hold of the side of her skirt suggests he might instead like to be shielded in turn.

“Now, Liam, that’s not a kind thing to say. That big scary man happens to be a dear friend.”

“Are you sure? He looks like he might eat you, to me. Or drink your blood.”

“Even if he were in the business of drinking blood, mine wouldn’t be to his tastes, Liam, I promise you. He’s just making sure I get back to the monastery safe, that’s all.” Her voice is grave as solid stone, even as one hand comes down to pat his hair gently, smoothing the unruly curls. “Do you believe me?”

“I guess so.” Liam relents, but this does not stop him from casting a final dubious look in Hubert’s direction before he releases Dorothea’s skirt and runs back into the house. He is at the window, still watching, as Hubert gives his arm to Dorothea, and they begin to walk together uphill into the twilight.

“You’ll have to forgive them,” she says, with a small laugh. “Children truly think what they say and have no qualms about saying what they think, you know?”

“I don’t begrudge it,” says Hubert. “They’re only trying in their way to protect you as you’ve protected them.”

She’s unable to suppress the flicker of pain that passes across her face then—the lowered eyes, the tightening mouth. “They shouldn’t have to think about protecting anything at all at their age, Hubie. They’re so young still.”

Hubert considers this, considers what they each know of childhood. Someone like Dorothea, of all people, ought to know how quickly a child might stop being a child in all but age, given the wrong confluence of circumstances.

Then again, it may be its own kind of bearing up against misfortune to not want others to suffer in the same way one has suffered. Hubert has seen Dorothea with these children; he knows the songs they sing together, the meals she’s learned to cook for them from what meager stores their army can spare. In their school days she had been all but hopeless in the kitchen, but she’s always had a tender heart, for better or for worse.

“And growing up in unprecedented times, at that.” He does not need to remind her, of course, about just what sorts of times they are currently living in, but it’s necessary pretext for what he says next. “They’re lucky by you.”

For a moment it looks as though she might begin to argue—protest the words, or laugh them off, as is sometimes her way when she feels she’s being lied to. She does not. Instead, her eyes wander up the hill to where the monastery stands, aged and changed, waiting for the wild doves to come nest in its spires.

* * *

“Hubie, can you sing?” Dorothea asks him, in the middle of an unofficial choir practice one summer afternoon. There’s a smile in her voice that betrays an ulterior motive—is in all likelihood not even trying to hide it.

Hubert, seated at the organ, looks up from the sheet music he’s been studying. He can already feel his mouth going thin.

“I can,” he says. “I cannot guarantee it will be anything pleasing to the ears should you compel me to do it, however.”

Dorothea hums thoughtfully to herself, but does not respond for a long while, electing instead to busy herself with showing their classmates where to stand, exhorting them to remember who they have on their left and on their right. In two weeks’ time, when the Garland Moon is full and the townspeople have gathered in the square for the long dance, they’ll assume this formation again, alongside the other houses. Each house will have prepared one song—a secular piece, for once, to match the festivities.

The song of the Black Eagle house, by popular vote, is a ballad. An old romantic piece about wild roses growing on the banks of the Airmid River. It had not had Hubert’s vote, but Edelgard had gone ahead and informed the Professor and Dorothea both that he did know how to play it, for all that. The truth is that Edelgard’s vote of confidence, unwelcome though it is, is the only reason Hubert has not abstained from this activity entirely.

Eventually—regretfully—Dorothea finishes fiddling with the standing arrangement, and returns to Hubert at the organ.

“I think,” she tells him, “I’d like you to sing with me.”

He stares at her over the rim of the music rack. “What?”

“I think,” she repeats, unflinching, with frankly quite overstated patience, “I would like you to—"

“No need to repeat it,” he says, before she can finish. “I heard you quite clearly the first time.” From somewhere behind Dorothea, Caspar snickers. There is some shifting in the pews around him, their assembled classmates growing restless in the warmth. “Why?”

Dorothea tilts her head. “Is it so strange for one friend to want to hear another’s voice? I know you prefer to get out of it at choir practice by volunteering to play the accompaniment, but I have it on good authority that you’ve quite the tenor, too.” Her bemused expression shifts, turns doe-eyed and pleading and utterly untrustworthy. “Please? Do this one thing for me and I’ll never torment you again.”

Hubert, in lieu of answering, looks at Edelgard in the front pew. She looks discreetly away.

“I highly doubt that.” He sighs, resistance and capitulation at once. “But fine. Though I will sing it solemnly.”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting you to sing it jovially, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Dorothea beams, and makes her way over to stand beside him. “But of course I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The truth is that there are so many he would rather be doing than this. Hubert has never liked the cathedral—has always detested the garishness of the stained-glass windows, the slanting sunlight, the way every sound tends to echo beneath the domed ceiling. Soon enough, he will have no cause to come here, ever again. His fingers will forget the organ, and his throat the notion of melody, and he will consign these things easily to another life, long ended now.

For now, peculiar as it is, Hubert still remembers music. Likewise peculiar that Dorothea should be here in this place, calling it out of him.

As he sounds the first chord, she sets her hand against the organ’s sidearm. They breathe in together, and start to sing.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! You can find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/strikingIight).


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